Towns in the Diamond Valley area are looking for input from the community before designing a plan for future growth of the area.

People living in Black Diamond, Turner Valley and the surrounding area are encouraged to add their input to the Intermunicipal Development Plan (IDP) being developed for the region during a workshop in Turner Valley’s Flare ‘n’ Derrick Community Hall Jan. 30 from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.

“We’ve done all the background information and the purpose of this is bring the public out and have them envision what the area might look like in the next 50 years,” said MD of Foothills planner and IDP project coordinator Coreena Carr.

A committee consisting of councillors, administration and planners in the two communities and the MD of Foothills will outline growth areas for residential, business and industrial development in Black Diamond, Turner Valley and the surrounding MD of Foothills to incorporate into the IDP. The committee will consider constraints to development, agricultural land, flood areas, topography, pipelines and accessibility to roads, highways and water and sewer lines.

The stakeholders’ workshop follows an open house held in Black Diamond last fall that presented independent studies, the 2002 IDP and potential growth areas.

This time attendees will work in groups with a facilitator to discuss what they see for the future, land they see as appropriate and not appropriate for growth and the type of growth they would like to occur, she said.

Maps will be present to show constraint areas in the two communities and surrounding MD, Carr said.

“It’s an interactive planning workshop where they are going to sit down and help us do some of the planning,” she said. “We are going to use this as one of our primary information sources and take what we learn and draft the plan in the next couple months.”

Carr said the IDP committee has been busy determining constraint areas, potential growth areas, applicable land use policies, different interests of the municipalities involved and opportunities for joint planning.

“We are hoping once we gather all the information from this workshop we are going to sit down at a staff level and start to draft the plan,” she said.

MD of Foothills planner Semra Kalkan said she looks forward to hearing the opinions of residents and expects the discussions will generate concerns and ideas that haven’t yet been addressed or considered in the IDP committee’s background information.

“We want groups with a mixture of different points of views at the same table,” she said. “This is an important step before starting drafting the plan.”

Notices were sent out to residents in Black Diamond, Turner Valley and the surrounding MD of Foothills. For more information or to register for the Jan. 30 workshop go to your town or MD website.

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